


and they lived (but no one ever said there was a happy ending)

by girlsarewolves



Category: Skinwalkers (2006)
Genre: Gen, Post-Movie, this is not a happily ever after story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-26
Updated: 2014-01-26
Packaged: 2018-01-09 20:56:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1150711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/girlsarewolves/pseuds/girlsarewolves
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's always a gun under her pillow when she goes to sleep (and she never sleeps when he's awake).</p>
            </blockquote>





	and they lived (but no one ever said there was a happy ending)

* * *

There's always a gun under her pillow when she goes to sleep (and she never sleeps when he's awake).

* * *

  
Rachel spent thirteen years living in a daze. Going through the motions; adjusting to life without a husband but with a baby on the way.  
  
Tim was born three weeks early, and giving birth had felt like her body trying to force their child - hers and Caleb's - out as though it was something foreign and unwanted.  
  
She remembered begging the doctor for something, anything for the pain, and he'd told her she was as drugged as they dared let her be. She had thought, for weeks after when her body ached and the tiny baby struggled to make it, that the doctor had been an inexperienced asshole who didn't have the foggiest idea what he was doing.  
  
"They should have put me under and cut him out," she'd ranted to her ever supportive brother-in-law. She stayed annoyed - sometimes using language that bordered on spiteful and maybe a little too blunt - because annoyed was safe.  
  
Anger was too strong, too close to grief and worry and fear.  
  
Caleb was dead.  
  
Her baby - a baby she was unprepared for and unsure if she really wanted if she was on her own - was 'touch and go' the doctors said.  
  
Jonas had listened and comforted and become a buffer between her and the hospital staff and the lawyers and the funeral home and, well, everyone. Jonas had always gone the extra mile; "I've got some experience in these matters," he'd told her.  
  
She'd forgotten that, but then she'd looked at Kat talking to the baby - Timothy, that was what Caleb had wanted to name their son - through glass and remembered.  
  
"How do you do it?" she had asked.  
  
Jonas - the dutiful brother, the quiet and enduring one - had given her a strained smile. "Because I have to."

* * *

  
Timothy pulled through a week later, and Rachel gave him her name without meaning to because writing Talbot hurt less than writing Varek.  
  
If Caleb's family minded, they hid it well.

* * *

  
All she had wanted was her husband. She stayed with his family because they were his, and because to her parents the name Caleb Varek left a sour taste on their tongues.  
  
"You married too young, now look at what he's left you with," her mother had said at the funeral.  
  
"A beautiful baby boy," Rachel had spat back and added that she regretted the day she told Caleb she wanted to keep her last name. But then she left, because she was getting too angry; too emotional.  
  
She'd bummed a cigarette off of one of her high school friends, just to calm her nerves. She didn't let it become a habit again (not when Caleb wasn't there to help her quit).

* * *

  
All those years and all those lies and all those emotions she'd suppressed and ignored.  
  
But she had Caleb back; her husband and her son instead of a family that was never hers even though they'd tried. She told herself for thirteen years it was because of Tim and because of Caleb's memories and nothing more.  
  
But they really had tried.  
  
And now they were dead.  
  
Rachel didn't let herself think about Caleb killing them or turning them on each other. She didn't dwell on a woman with wild hair that was darker than hers and the betrayal on that woman's face that must have mirrored her own.  
  
At night it was impossible not to remember the look on a monster's face when he tried to kill her and her son.

* * *

  
"They just broke in and went for him, Jonas," she'd whispered through tears on Tim's fifth birthday - spent all day at Will's because her son could barely breathe, and Will somehow always knew how to help him.  
  
"I know."  
  
She'd shaken her head, barely able to breathe now herself. "No, you don't. You didn't see that cold look in their eyes; like something inhuman."  
  
But he'd known. He'd always known, more than she could have ever guessed.  
  
Rachel doubted even he could have imagined seeing that cold look in Caleb's eyes. Rachel doubted Jonas could have prepared for Caleb using Katherine for a bargaining chip, or the realization that even though it was Caleb, Nana was still dead.  
  
"He's my husband, your brother!" she'd said not even a day later. Clinging to hope - even though she knew he wasn't the same, even though she'd seen the cold look in his eyes while he pressed the barrel of a gun to his own niece's temple. Even though she'd heard the derision when he spoke of humans, of people like her. "He's my husband, your brother!" she had said.  
  
That was what made it so much worse. She had just overlooked the fact (until she couldn't any longer).

* * *

  
"I thought of you every day of every year you were gone. Did you ever think of me?" she'd asked him three nights after the factory, when Timothy was sleeping.  
  
Caleb had stared at his hands. He hadn't said much since that night. He was quieter than Jonas now. "Some. At first." He didn't add if he stopped before or after finding the other woman with darker hair and wilder eyes.  
  
Rachel couldn't bare to make him.

* * *

  
There's always a gun under her pillow when she sleeps. And she doesn't sleep when he's awake. Even if he protects them from any others, there's always that thought, in the back of her head.  
  
How much of Caleb was in that man at the hospital, in that monster at the factory that night? How much of that monster is gone from Caleb now? How long will that last taste of blood really sate him?  
  
Should that cold look ever come back, who'll protect her and her son from him?  
  
Rachel touches the gun under her pillow and holds her sleeping son close - stronger now, no more wheezing - and promises herself that should the time come, she will.  
  
 _Because I have to._

**Author's Note:**

> I finally write something new for Skinwalkers, and it's during a bad bout of insomnia and it focuses on movie canon Rachel? Sometimes my brain works in strange ways.


End file.
